Maryland

Originally called Armistice Day, November 11, 1919, was reserved as a day of remembrance for the one-year anniversary of the end of the Great War. Observed since 1926 and celebrated as a national holiday since 1938, now known as Veterans Day, honors all military personnel who have served the United States. This year, America celebrated the 99th anniversary of the day that ended the “War to End All Wars.” Accessible at the University of Maryland Special Collections, the Milton Reckord papers – which includes letters, photographs, newspaper clippings, awards, and memorabilia – affords an opportunity to compare the correspondence of two of Harford County’s very own “doughboys” from Maryland, General Milton Atchinson Reckord, and his younger brother, Colonel Leland Tell Reckord.

The Sue Fryer Ward papers were recently donated to the University of Maryland’s Special Collections by Ward’s daughter, Lucille Ward Walker. They chronicle Ward’s activities as a licensed social worker and her political career at the county and state level. A first in a series of donations, this particular group of materials includes Sue Fryer Ward’s correspondence, news clippings, speeches, certificates and other awards, reports, and photographs.

Photograph of Sue Fryer Ward with then-County Executive Parris Glendening, 1994. Note reads: “To Sue: With warmest congratulations. You have been a key to the progressive spirit of this county. Parris.” Sue Fryer Ward papers, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Maryland Libraries.

Ward was passionate about advocating for the rights of elders. As a child, she spent ten years living on a Navajo reservation while her father worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. She witnessed the respect that the Navajo tribe paid to their elders; this experience helped to inspire the work she did on behalf of senior citizens. Ward was the director of the Department of Aging for Prince George’s County from 1982 to1991. During this time, she worked closely with then-County Executive Parris Glendening to improve health care, transportation, and housing options for elders. Ward was also the director of the County’s Department of Family Services from 1992 to 1995. By consolidating the Department of Aging with the Commission for Women, the Commission for Persons with Disabilities, the Commission for Children and Youth, and the Commission for Families, Ward and other officials were able to better serve those in need by combining their knowledge and resources. As governor of Maryland, Parris Glendening later named Ward the director of Maryland’s Office on Aging, a position that she held between 1995 and1998. This agency became a Cabinet-level department in 1998 and Ward was appointed the Secretary of Aging for the State of Maryland. She was the first person to hold this position.

After Ward left government service in 2003, she became the grassroots director for the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare. In this role, she fought against cuts to Social Security and Medicare and led efforts to educate citizens across the nation about the importance of these programs. Ward retired from this position in 2011.

Photograph of Sue Fryer Ward with a colleague at the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, ca. 2003. Sue Fryer Ward papers, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Maryland Libraries.

Sue Fryer Ward was also a candidate for the House of Representatives in 1978. She challenged Republican incumbent Marjorie Holt for the seat of Maryland’s Fourth District. During her campaign, she focused on employment, inflation, energy, and the improvement of services like day care, education, and housing. The Sue Fryer Ward papers include news clippings, campaign buttons, stickers, an election guide, and correspondence which relate to this ultimately unsuccessful congressional campaign.

Throughout her life, Ward remained politically active. She helped to staff polls on Election Day and participated in various political demonstrations. Ward received the 1994 Gladys Noon Spellman Award for Excellence in Public Service for her service to the Prince George’s County government. She also received a 2001 Kathleen Kennedy Townsend Award of Excellence to Outstanding Women in Government Service. The Maryland chapter of the National Association of Social Workers selected Ward as the Social Worker of the Year in 2003. She was also posthumously inducted into the Maryland Women’s Hall of Fame in 2015. Many of the certificates and plaques that Ward earned throughout her career are included in this group of materials.

Campaign buttons. Sue Fryer Ward papers, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Maryland Libraries.

Among its several collection strengths, the Maryland and Historical Collections unit strives to document the activities of Maryland women in politics through active collecting. Researchers can learn more about similar resources by consulting the Women’s Political Papers section of the Women in Maryland LibGuide. The Sue Fryer Ward papers join the papers of Lucille Maurer, Carol S. Petzold, and Pauline Menes, now available to researchers in the Maryland Room of Hornbake Library. This collection would be helpful for researchers particularly interested in Maryland women in politics and in advocacy for senior citizens.

Emily Flint is a first year MLIS student in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland. She works in the State of Maryland and Historical Collections at UMD’s Special Collections and University Archives.

On April 27, 2017, Special Collections and University Archives hosted a Preservation Maryland Open House. I organized the open house as part of my practicum for the Museum Scholarship and Material Culture graduate certificate program with guidance from Maryland and Historical Collections Curator Liz Novara. The Preservation Maryland archives are one of many Historic Preservation collections available for research here at SCUA. This particular collection is significant in that it documents the transition of the nation’s second oldest preservation organization from a model of stewarding historic structures to advocacy of historic preservation. The Preservation Maryland archives, dating back to 1931, document a preeminent force in the modern historic preservation movement.

Housed at Special Collections and University Archives, Preservation Maryland’s archives are an incredible resource for the university’s historic preservation students, the historic preservation community, and anyone interested in Maryland history. These documents are open to the public and you can find out more here.

Maryland Avenue. South Baltimore Street. Water Street. Are these streets in Maryland? (1)

The answer is “yes” if you’re thinking of Maryland County in Africa. Located at the southeastern tip of Liberia, “Maryland County” takes its current name for the independent settlement and later republic, which began in the 1830s under the direction of the Maryland State Colonization Society. That organization’s mission was to manage the removal of recently-manumitted African-Americans to Africa or elsewhere. Between 1831 and 1851, the society oversaw the state-enforced emigration of 1,025 Maryland-born individuals of color. (2)

Fifteen of those individuals comprised a single unit – the family of Thomas and Frances Davenport (ages 46 and 44, respectively), who had thirteen children and grandchildren. An extract from a Frederick County court record, available at the University of Maryland Special Collections, indicates that the Davenport family was freed by their master Adam Wever on June 24, 1836. But only on “the express Condition that the above named negroes, & each, + every of them shall within a reasonable time from the date of said manumission proceed to the Colony of Cape Palmas in Maryland, in Liberia on the Coast of Africa, + there continue to reside” (http://digital.lib.umd.edu/image?pid=umd:89408).

Indeed, under two weeks after obtaining their freedom from bondage, the Davenport family were nearly compelled to board the brig Financier in Baltimore harbor, along with two other emancipated African-Americans, and sailed for Africa. Thomas Davenport, a farmer and carpenter, lived in the new colony on the west coast of Africa until his death of dropsy in 1843. Indeed, life was precious there. By 1852, only eight of the original fifteen family members – Frances Davenport, six of her children, and one granddaughter – were known to reside in the Maryland colony. (3)

The nation of Liberia and its “Maryland County” deserves recognition within the history of Maryland, which in its broadest sense ought to include mention of the places outside of Maryland which natives of the state have shaped. In particular, the passage by the Maryland legislature of “An act relating to the People of Color in this state” on March 12, 1832, contributed directly to the creation of African-American settlements in Africa. The act empowered a three-person Board of Managers, chosen from among members of the Maryland State Colonization Society, to act on the state’s behalf and with the state’s money to not only encourage slaveholders to free their slaves, but to police the free black community. In the wake of Nat Turner’s rebellion in Virginia, the politicians who had been elected to represent the state of Maryland passed this measure largely in order to prevent the further growth of the free African-American population, which numbered over 50,000 in the state in 1830. (4)

(A facsimile of the fifty-cent and one dollar paper currency issued by the Board of Managers beginning in October 1837. Also issued were bills equivalent to five, ten, and twenty-five cents. For use by the Maryland emigrants to Liberia at the “Government Store” in Harper, only the equivalent of eight hundred dollars was printed during the first run. (John H.B. Latrobe, “Maryland in Liberia”: a history of the colony planted by the Maryland State Colonization Society under the auspices of the State of Maryland, U.S., at Cape Palmas on the south-west coast of Africa, 1833-1853 (John Murphy & Co.: Baltimore, 1885), p. 57-59, between 134-135). Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries).

One of the measures within the 1832 law involved county clerks and registers of wills, who were deputized into reporting the number and details of the individuals who had been manumitted. Thus, the author of the aforementioned extract, Henry Schley, clerk of the Circuit Court in Frederick County since 1835, when he took over the job from his father, was just following orders when he reported the names and ages of Thomas and Frances Davenport and their offspring to the “Board of Managers.” (4) Schley would have been penalized ten dollars every time he failed to hand-copy this type of record and send it to the authorities in question. The Board of Managers were then supposed to “notify the American Colonization Society, or the Maryland State Colonization Society thereof, and to propose to such society that they shall engage, at the expense of such society, to remove said slave or slaves so manumitted to Liberia.” If the newly emancipated individuals expressed a desire to remain within North America’s Maryland, the board was to alert the sheriff, who would escort them out of the state. To remain in the state, the manumitted could, however, “renounce, in open court, the benefit of said deed or will, and to continue a slave.” Another portion of the law allowed the Board of Managers to hire out (or temporarily purchase) slaves intended to be manumitted. The income accrued from the slave’s labor would help pay for the expenses of removal to Africa. (5)

Without the compliance of county clerks like Schley, the counting and emigration of manumitted African-Americans across the entire state of Maryland would have been more difficult. Over 160 documents in the Maryland Manuscripts Collection at the University of Maryland (http://hdl.handle.net/1903.1/1716) – quite a few in the hand of Frederick County’s clerk Henry Schley – record the manumission, as well as the sale, of slaves to the Board of Managers working on behalf of the Maryland State Colonization Society’s goal of creating Maryland in Africa. Given that only 1,025 individuals left for Liberia out of some 5,571 recorded manumissions in the state between 1831 and 1851, the success of the colonial project – if not the success of the colony – remains debatable. (6)

Dr. Eric C. Stoykovich is the Historical Manuscripts Project Archivist in the University of Maryland’s Special Collections and University Archives in Hornbake Library, where he works under the Curator on collections which tell the story of political officials and civic groups in the state of Maryland. He received his MLS from UMD’s iSchool and a PhD in American history from the University of Virginia. His interests include archival history, political development, and institutional change.

This semester we hosted an Open House for University staff and displayed some of the interesting material found within our collection.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Three of these items came from our literary collection and included an early edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, an inscribed copy of Mark Twain’s Sketches, New and Old, and a 1794 edition of A Vindication of the Rights of Women. These early editions provided insights into the times in which they were produced through their format, inscriptions or by the significance of their ownership. Much can be learned by looking at original copies of common works.

If you would like to talk to us about using our collections for your own research or to support your instruction, please let us know. We often work with faculty and look forward to the opportunity to get to know you and your students.

Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Maryland Libraries is home to political collections such as the Spiro T. Agnew papers, the Theodore R. McKeldin papers, the Daniel Brewster papers, and the Hervey Machen papers, which contain information and interesting perspectives on local, national, and international events. One such event documented in these four collections is the effort of Marylanders to assist in the relief of Italians flooded out of their homes fifty years ago this month. In early November 1966, much of north-central Italy was inundated by flood waters. As many as 300 people may have been killed, up to 50,000 farm animals were drowned, and countless shops and buildings destroyed (1). Refugees sought shelter in makeshift housing. The cities of Florence and Venice were especially hard hit. Devastatingly, the great concentration of art, architecture, and cultural heritage found in Florence was subjected to flood waters that reached 22 feet high in some places. The National Library of Florence was underwater. Astride the Arno River, the Ponte Vecchio, which dates back 2300 years to Roman times, had been badly damaged.

The Baltimore News American collection includes photographs of the Italian floods of 1966. Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries.

The response to the 1966 flood in Florence was decidedly international, as Americans Continue reading →

Think the current presidential election campaign has been unusual? The new exhibit in the Maryland Room of Hornbake Library explores some of the strange techniques that presidential candidates have used to appeal to voters across much of American history. Candidates (or their spokespeople) have spread serious ideas and spurious notions; built interest from specific demographics of people; sought the support of parties and coalitions of parties; and deployed advertising to increase public visibility and name recognition.

The documents and artifacts in this exhibit date from the 1830s to the 1980s, and are drawn from a variety of collections available for research in the Maryland Room. These include the Spiro T. Agnew papers, the James Bruce papers, the Joseph Tydings papers, the archives of the National Organization for Women (Maryland Chapter), the Rare Books collection, and the Marylandia collection.

Items of particular interest, perhaps, are the autograph letter signed by Senator John F. Kennedy after his nomination by the Democratic Party in 1960, and two official White House photographs, which separately depict Vice President Spiro T. Agnew and President Ronald Reagan. But, then again, there’s the 1932 poster for Franklin D. Roosevelt which promoted “Beer Instead of Taxes.”